ABSTRACT
Tucumán Arde, the best-known collective action of the Argentine avant-garde movement during the 1960s, is usually regarded as an isolated milestone, an exceptional event. However, this chapter considers it instead as the corollary of the hectic process of aesthetic and political radicalization of the experimental artistic groups of the cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario and intends to contextualize that production within this historical period. This chapter summarizes an extensive research begun in the 1990s and carried out by the authors about the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and the political vanguard in 1968 in Argentina. They published the result of this research in the book Del Di Tella a “Tucumán Arde” (Buenos Aires, El cielo por asalto, 2000). Later, they revisited this experience and rediscussed its memory, especially the construction of a mythical narrative about Tucumán Arde as an exceptional event.
